Chapter 15 #2
His wife’s large blue eyes regarded him with some unreadable emotion as they spin and twirled. Perhaps he should not have let her lead him into talking of Lady Lepford. It was never a good idea to talk intimately of one woman with another. Then her gaze resolved into a kind of understanding.
“If I had danced with you, I likely would not have ended up in the gardens at all,” Rose remarked. “I would have been on the dance floor with you when Lord Gillingham left the party and likely would not have spoken to him. Then I would not have been upset and rushed outside.”
“Lord Gillingham?” repeated Dorian, his skin prickling in an unfamiliar way. “What has that small-minded bore to do with anything?”
Rose looked surprised at his reaction, but then, he was surprised himself. Dorian had not particularly liked the man, and Lord Gillingham was not generally popular, but he was not the kind of person to inspire strong feeling.
“Everyone told me not to, but I approached Lord Gillingham and tried to make him ask me to dance. He refused and called me a simpleton,” Rose confessed, clearly chagrined at the memory.
“I had some fantasy that he was shy like me, and that we would have some sweet romance like in a novel. When he rejected me so cruelly, I ran away into the gardens.”
Dorian snorted with derision for Lord Gillingham overlaid by other less familiar emotions, his hand tightening on Rose’s waist.
“Gillingham is a social menace,” he stated rather shortly. “Men like him do far more damage than men who actually like women. You would have been safer dancing with me that night. I would never have hurt you.”
“I did not know you then,” Rose pointed out. “You were only a handsome and charming man that others warned against – the Wolf of West London…”
Again, this nickname was normally something that made Dorian laugh, but tonight, from Rose’s lips, it cut him in some way.
“And now?” he demanded as the music wound down, leaving them on the edge of the dance floor, still holding one another close. “Do you know me now?”
“What do you mean, Dorian?” Rose asked, her beautiful face in confusion. “What is wrong?”
It was a very good question and not one that Dorian felt able to adequately answer with words alone. His blood was pulsing with tangled instincts and emotions.
“Come with me,” he told her, drawing him with him towards the conservatories. “We must talk privately.”
The Duke of Ravenhill marched through the first glasshouses, past the various resting elderly dowagers and chaperoned young lovers, and into the unlit rooms beyond, hoping to find warmer chambers, perhaps an orangery or tropical room.
The half-moon shining in through the glass ceiling covered Rose in silvered shadow and glinted on the diamonds adorning her pale throat and the rounded bosom beneath. How very beautiful his wife appeared in this light – his wife, Rose, the Duchess of Ravenhill.
“Dorian, what is it?” asked Rose’s voice again, soft, warm and womanly in tone. “Why are we here?”
Acting on impulse, he took her into his arms in reply and kissed her passionately, her initial gasp of surprise becoming a sigh of enjoyment.
How dare Lord Gillingham insult his duchess! That cold and mannerless man did not merit the attention of any woman, never mind a woman like Rose. Gillingham was the kind who could not know any human being intimately and ought to remain among his antique books.
Dorian’s lips brushed Rose’s face, her throat, the swell of her breasts.
His hands ranged over the curves of her hips and bottom beneath the silken skirts.
How could she have pursued Gillingham, who was clearly so incapable of appreciating any part of her, mind or body? The very thought offended him.
“Do you still hanker after the world of your romance novels?” he asked, his tongue flickering in Rose’s ear. “Do you still wish that some shy hero with hidden depths had swept you off your feet and carried you off on a white horse?”
His teeth pressed gently at Rose’s throat and she moaned at the back of her throat.
Thinking of how she had marked him on their very first foray into sexual pleasure, Dorian was very tempted to return the favor at this moment.
Part of him wanted Rose to know, wanted everyone to know, that she was his.
“This…what you do to me, is better than any romance novel,” Rose whispered. “Every time you touch me, I want more. I do not care for my old dreams and stories of love.”
“You want my body?” Dorian asked, his voice growing more ragged with each kiss he pressed onto her skin. “You want to be naked in my bed? You want to learn to play every game I can teach you?”
She nodded and then whimpered in mingled arousal and alarm as he unfastened and drew down the already low front of her dress, baring Rose’s breasts to the moonlight and cold air.
“Good, because you are mine, Rose. You are my wife. Do you understand?”
“I am yours,” she gasped as Dorian covered one breast with a large warm hand and then drew the other nipple into his mouth and caressed it with his tongue.
“My wife,” he said again, capturing her lips and raising her leg to his hip to caress her silken thigh under her skirts.
His hand felt softness, warmth and damp fur. Would Rose be wet for him already? A brush of his fingertips and sharp accompanying cry told him that she was. If only there were somewhere to lay her down, or a wall to support her back, but there seemed to be only cold stone and glass.
Well, Rose was small enough that he could lower her onto his shaft and hold her there if she wrapped her legs around his waist…
“Here?” she asked tremulously. “Now?”
Dorian paused, recognizing that Rose’s shivering was from cold as well as desire and perceiving her vulnerability.
She was young and these urges were new to her.
Likely, Rose did not yet know how to refuse him when she should.
Tenderness slowed his previous lust. He did not need to claim his wife now; he had only needed to be assured that he could.
Restoring her dress to a decent position, he took off his jacket and draped it around the shoulders of his duchess.
“No,” he said. “Later, at Ravenhill House, on a rug before a roaring fire, with all the time in the world.”
Rose smiled and embraced him.
“I am yours,” she said again, without reservation.
“Columbus is a good horse, isn't he?” commented the Duke of Ravenhill as he and the Duke of Ashbourne pulled up their mounts on the other side of the river at the edge of the Ravenhill estate.
The breath of both men and beasts rose in white clouds in the freezing December air. In the few days since the Carforth ball, the temperature had fallen again and the ground was like iron.
“Very strong too,” Cassius Emerton agreed, patting the flank of the large white stallion he rode. “It felt like I was flying over that last jump.”
“I gave his sister Clio to Rose,” Dorian added conversationally, as they began to trot together along the river path. “Clio is strong too, but easier to control than Columbus. Rose had not done much riding before she came here, but now she is quite the horsewoman.”
“Is that so?” Cassius asked with a smile and a raised eyebrow.
Dorian laughed heartily and shook his head.
“I was speaking literally, Cassius. You know I do not talk like that about my women, not even to my oldest friends.”
“I know,” Cassius nodded, joining him in laughter. “Forgive my teasing, I could not resist so easy a joke. I will say, however, that the two of you seem happy together now, however this marriage began.”
“Yes, I believe we are,” Dorian agreed, thinking back over recent weeks and nodding. “We are happier than I thought we could be, given the challenges you allude to.”
“Then you accept now that your marriage is not a punishment from the gods?” asked his friend with twinkling eyes.
The Duke of Ravenhill groaned, thinking back to that depressing and self-piteous pre-wedding conversation at his club.
“Do not remind me of what I said to you that night, Cassius. As you told me, my punishment has been a comely wife of generous dowry and the sweetest character in England. No, it is no punishment at all to be married to Rose.”
“Luckily, your wife seems equally content,” Cassius observed. “In fact, I have never seen Rose look so well. When I first met her, she could not say two words without Josephine on one side and Lady Madeline on the other to support her. Now, she is very much mistress of her own home.”
Dorian nodded with pleasure, thinking of Rose’s recent initiatives in rearranging several of the public rooms for better function or more modern taste.
She had even been engaging with Mrs. Jennings on household menus and introducing unusual new foods and exotic fruits for them both to try.
In less than two weeks, it would be Christmas and he looked forward to the surprises Rose had promised.
“Rose is the Duchess of Ravenhill,” Dorian said with a shrug and a touch of pride in his wife. “My household is safe in her hands, I believe. Even more importantly, Rose is very good company.”
“I gather that you have not kept yourself from her bed after all,” the Duke of Ashbourne put in bluntly now.
At first, Dorian only smiled and remained silent but then he sighed.
“Rose came to my bed first,” he admitted. “It was not what I planned but I have no regrets and it is probably for the best. After all, Rose does want a child…”
Dorian’s voice trailed off and he shook his head.
“No, I deceive myself if I claim to have acted solely out of duty in the bedroom. I am a hot-blooded man, Rose is a very lovely and healthy young woman, and she is my wife. That is the simple truth. We were hardly going to live together in chastity forever, were we?”
“It seemed unlikely” agreed Cassius equably and they rode on together in silence for a few minutes before he added a short but disturbing question. “Do you love Rose? I know that Josephine will ask me that.”
“Love?!” Dorian answered swiftly with a deliberately urbane laugh. “Jane asked me the same question when I last visited. As I told her, I believe it is better that I do not love Rose. Duty, care and friendship, and even desire, are all more easily handled when love does not come into the matter.”
“You always talk as though life can be arranged by will, with clever thinking and a good grasp of the rules, as though you were moving pieces on a chess board,” complained Cassius with equal humor.
“It can and it should,” averred Dorian. “If I loved Rose, or she loved me, how miserable we could become. Love turns so swiftly to hate, and hate which came from love seems so much more powerful than other kinds.”
“I have never found that myself,” his friend demurred.
“You never had the misfortune to meet my parents,” Dorian told Cassius with dark humor.
“One day screaming, the next embracing, the next away with other lovers, the next spent in recrimination, the next in repentance, then forgiveness, back to love and the whole cycle begins again. Then think what love has done to Jane Chatham, and her mother before her. No, thank you. Love is not for me.”
“That is not the kind of love I have known,” Cassius started to point out but Dorian did not want to hear. “Nor do I believe Jane regrets anything of love, from what you have said.”
“I am happy for you and your Josephine, truly,” Dorian assured the Duke of Ashbourne. “I am glad that Jane’s life is without great regret. But for Rose and I, in our very different situation, it is better my way. We have understanding, desire and friendship. Love need not get in our way.”
Even as he spoke the words, the levity in Dorian’s voice rang false to his own ears and he felt a pang of misgiving. Cassius’ next question turned the pang into something more painful again.
“What if Rose loves you, Dorian? You’re handsome, experienced, brave enough to do your duty, and you’re the only lover she’s ever had. It would take no great leap of imagination to think that a young woman in her situation, with her temperament, might easily fall for such a rescuer.”
“Rose has told me herself that she would rather have what we have than what is in her old romance books,” said Dorian, the words sounding like an attempt to convince himself.
“She enjoys my company and knows I will take care of her and any child. I am a better husband than many, with or without declarations of love.”
Cassius sighed, as though giving up on something.
“I will not tax you further, old friend,” he said. “I only wish you to know that falling in love need not be the end of the world, for either of you.”
“Tell me more about your friend Levi,” Dorian put in, changing the subject completely to one they had touched on in their recent correspondence. “You wrote that he would be in London in January and that you would be grateful if I met him.”
“Ah, yes, indeed. Levi Collins is the new Duke of Hawcrest, through a chain of unfortunate events far more tenuous than your own accession. It was a second cousin of his who recently died without issue and his inheritance is proving both a boon and a burden.”
“How so?” asked Dorian, only glad to move on from examining his own life.
“Levi has always been a man of business and the surviving relatives of the previous duke have not made the transition to the Hawcrest estate easy for him,” explained Cassius. “I believe it would do him good to meet more reasonable and less conventional members of the ton.”
“Ah, the traditional English upper-class respect for merit and sense of fair play,” Dorian commented sarcastically, a smile of understanding spreading on his features. “Yes, I would be happy to meet Levi Collins.”
“I shall write and tell him. Which direction?”
The path in the road forked here and Cassius looked to his friend for guidance.
“The weather grows cold, let us ride hard for home,” declared Dorian, urging his horse into a canter and then a gallop on the lower path, their pace immediately copied by the Duke of Ashbourne.
In truth, it was not the cold that drove the Duke of Ravenhill back. His whole temper and mind felt out of sorts after being forced to talk of love. It was a subject and an emotion he had spent his whole life avoiding.
Now, Dorian longed only to be home with Rose and to bury himself in her soft, welcoming warmth. Whenever he could do that, nothing else seemed to matter, past, present or future.